Treasure Hill Artist Village is known to host installation art, sound art, noise art, video art — or whatever avant-garde concept is next — that eludes the common viewer. But it’s still fun to visit and pretend to possess such deep philosophical knowledge about art. It Must Be the Moon is a solo exhibition by Belgian-born, Indonesia-based artist Sara Nuytemans. Nuytemans’ artwork, which traverses audio-visual, installation and performance, is deeply introspective but one of her main objectives is getting viewers involved as well. Inspired by the many mysteries of the moon, this particular installation is designed to stimulate our alpha-theta brainwaves (not the sorority), which are connected to creative thought. So be prepared to be bursting with creativity upon entering the exhibition.
■ Attic Gallery (閣樓展覽室), Treasure Hill Artist Village (寶藏巖國際藝術村), 2, Alley 14, Ln 230, Dingzhou Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市汀州路三段230巷14弄2號), tel: (02) 2364-5313. Open Tuesday to Sundays from 11am to 6pm
■ Until June 28
Photo courtesy of Eslite Gallery
Chinese takeout in America is nothing like Chinese food in Taiwan. It’s greasy, gross and stuffed inside a paper container (I nearly hurled when I tried it for the first time in New York). Yet Taipei-born artist Wu Mong-jane (吳孟真) manages to see past the repulsiveness. She very elegantly unravels the struggle for identity inherent in immigrant cultures in the US through her photographs of Chinese takeout food. The pictures, she says, “portray Americanized Chinese food gelatinized into the shape of a takeout container.” The colorful backgrounds refer to people’s various interpretations of the food. The way it is photographed invokes a similar feel to that of a commercial studio — which is contrasted by the modesty of the clumps of food. This of course, is an allusion to the mish-mash and malleability of immigrants who must adapt to American culture. Wu’s work will be on display at Dai-hsia Gallery at the Chinese Culture University in an exhibition titled Pseudo/ Mixed Light (可道地). She will also be conducting live performances on Sunday at 2pm and June 28 at 2pm.
■ Dai-hsia Gallery (大夏藝廊), Chinese Culture University School of Continuing Education (文化大學推廣教育部), 231, Jianguo S Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市建國南路二段231號). Open Mondays to Saturdays from 9am to 9pm, Sundays from 9am to 5pm
■ Opens Sunday. Until June 30
Photo courtesy of Wu Mong-jane
Artists Li Yi-fan (李亦凡) and Yang Chun-chieh (楊竣傑) believe the story shouldn’t have ended when Humpty Dumpty fell off a wall and had a great fall. Their exhibition, held at Frees Art Space in Taipei and aptly titled Rest in Pieces (蛋蛋ㄉ哀傷), explores what might have happened if Humpty Dumpty was reincarnated, and places him in various present-day situations. Yang uses hand-drawn animation, a technique that predates video — which is Li’s main medium. Collectively, their work is a dialogue between past and present, fleshing out a centuries-old fascination with a violent nursery rhyme that is meant for children.
■ Frees Art Space (福利社), B1, 82, Xinsheng N Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市新生北路三段82號B1); tel: (02) 2585-7600. Open Tuesdays to Fridays from 11am to 7pm, Saturdays 1:30pm to 9pm, closed Sundays and Mondays
■ Until July 11
Photo courtesy of Frees Art Space
Lai Chih-sheng (賴志盛) is known for his minimalist paintings and installations. His latest exhibition, Scene (這), held at Taipei’s Eslite Gallery, displays site-specific installations, sculptures and drawings based on his artist-in-residence in Paris last year. The works in this series question the notions of space and time. In Beyond Untitled (無題之後) for instance, Lai peels back several layers of a wall in the museum to reveal the various types of paints used in previous exhibitions at Eslite Gallery over the last six years. As different patterns and textures are exposed, viewers get the feeling that time is both ephemeral and yet omnipresent — an invisible force beyond our control.
■ Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊), 5F, 11 Songgao Rd, Taipei City (台北市松高路11號5樓), tel: (02) 8789-3388. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until July 12
Not to be outdone by the myriad of architectural exhibitions currently taking place at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei has launched its own. Consisting of work by artist Huang Ning (黃甯), architect Liu Ping-cheng (劉秉承) and architecture students from Chaoyang University of Technology (朝陽科技大學), Landless‧Endless — Exhibition of Future Architecture (無土之境‧無限之界 — 未來建築展) takes as its muse the three-dimensional shape of an elevator. A seemingly simple machine, elevators are symbolic of many things such as providing an aerial view of all of the earth’s problems, as well as a protective bubble in which to view them. The exhibition is also futuristic in the sense that the designs imagine an alternative living space where urban planning has become vertical. If this were to happen, the way we think and go about our daily lives would be drastically altered.
■ Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (台北當代藝術館, MOCA, Taipei), 39 Changan W Rd, Taipei City (台北市長安西路39號), tel: (02) 2552-3720. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until August 16
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would